The theme of June's two-day couples group is "Keeping the Erotic Pot Bubbling," and Philadelphia psychotherapist Judith Coché is wearing red. It's not racy red—she's wearing a knee-length dress, scarlet with tiny sprigs of white flowers—but choosing a red dress and hot pink sandals to kick off the group's sex weekend is the kind of thing she'd do. As the members, five couples, take seats in Coché's "summer" office, in seaside New Jersey, everyone seems edgy, or at least curious. How far will crazy Judith take this titillating theme? For two years, I will observe these 10 people in monthly, daylong sessions of group marital therapy with Coché. I can tell they respect her, and most of them are pretty trusting of her, too, but they know she has a provocateur's bent. You might be explaining how you barked at your boyhusband one afternoon, and before you know it, she's taken it to incest in the dark of night.

"Who wants to start—how would you like to improve sexual enjoyment with your partner?" she asks. When Coché, who's in her early sixties, ran the group with her late husband, Erich Coché, they had a good cop/bad cop routine going: Erich reassured, stroked; she pushed. "Causing the right amount of trouble is an art form," Coché likes to say. She has had other coleaders since Erich died of cancer in 1991, and her sidekick for this session is sex therapist Julian Slowinski, a former Benedictine monk with a bearded, teddy bear face. He's the designated nice guy to her troublemaker. This weekend, however, trouble will practically start itself, coming from way out in left field. Or to use Coché's cliché, it will come from an empty erotic pot, one blackened and crusty with the remains of what had been cooking years before. Yet at the moment, nothing seems terribly dire.

"Should we begin?" Michael says, turning to his wife, Rachael, who at 34 is the youngest member of the group. The spouses range in age from their mid-thirties to their late fifties and have been married anywhere from a few months to nearly three decades. Rachael shrugs good-naturedly at her husband's bid to start. She's an Australian émigré with fair skin, pale blue eyes, and chin-length curls. Michael, four years her senior, has a slightly beaky nose and a floppy shock of brown hair that he is forever pushing out of his face. If how people act on a couch is any indication of what goes on in bed, these two are doing fine. "I'm a little blunt," Michael says to the group. "I would want more oral foreplay." He turns to his wife, who giggles. "Are you embarrassed?"

"In a funny way," Rachael says.

"Do you want to give or receive, or both?" Coché asks.

"Receive," Michael says. "I've given, but more receive. On the whole, I think our sex life is actually very robust. Um, it's just that certain skills need to be improved."

"Anybody?" Coché says, a little like a carnival barker. "Who else would enjoy more oral play?"

Thunderous silence.

"Who wants to admit it?" Michael deadpans.

"So nobody?" Coché repeats.

"Well, I'd like it to happen," pipes up 57- year-old Leigh, who's been married to Aaron, nearly 60, for seven years. "That's one of the things I feel I've had to give up in this marriage." Like Coché, Leigh was widowed in her late forties. Aaron is her second husband, and they've been in the group for a decade— longer than anyone in Coché's 20-plus years of running couples sessions (the typical stay is two years). They joined before they married, to determine if they wanted to marry, in fact. The major problem: Aaron's anxiety-based sexual dysfunction.

"So `more' isn't quite right," Coché says.

"Just some would be wonderful," Leigh says, "but it's not going to happen."

"I'm just resigned," Leigh says. "I don't want to pressure him or make him feel he has to." But, she says pointedly to Slowinski, "I'm not giving him permission not to." She turns to Aaron, also on his second marriage, the first having ended in divorce: "Did you feel I was giving you permission not to?"

"No." It's the shortest answer Aaron will give all year.

"I think I'd like some too." It's Clem, joining the deprived contingent. His wife is Marie, and they're both in their mid-forties, married 21 years. "But pressuring Marie isn't going to help." Clem is the essence of mild: fit and trim, with prematurely white hair that sets off his baby blue eyes.

"How's the erotic pot?" It's Bella. She and her husband, Joe, were running late, and they've just arrived, blown in on a fresh wind. They're attractive, well dressed: prom queen and king for the moment. They plop down in two chairs waiting for them. Bella crosses her legs. She's wearing a clinging royal blue dress and strappy gold sandals.

Rachael, who'd just begun her sexual wish list when Bella and Joe came through the door (she'd like to try new sexual positions and dress more erotically, if she could shed a few pounds), smiles at the couple, who are close to her age.

"How does it feel to walk into this conversation?" Coché asks Bella and Joe.

"Actually, it feels good," Joe says, like, no problem; he's cool with this therapy thing, with graphic sex talk. To begin melding the reconfigured group, Coché says she wants to back up for a minute. "A group moves as quickly as its slowest member, and we were just joined by two people who didn't have the benefit of being with us last time." (Bella and Joe had to miss the first session because of a longscheduled Italian vacation.) Coché wants to go from person to person, to find out how many total years of marriage are in the room. The members oblige her matter-offactly, with the exception of Mark, who speaks proudly of his 27-year marriage. Mark and his wife, Sue Ellen, first visited Coché because of their teenage son's drug problem, and she recommended that they join the group—if their marriage improved, she advised, they'd be better parents. This is their second year, and Coché told me they have made "huge progress." I believe her. The couple's long marriage seems like a soft cloak, rather than an itchy wool topcoat with rocks in the pockets.

"Of those years of marriage," Coché continues, addressing the group again, "how many have felt satisfying, successful?"

"Two months," Rachael says, which is how long she's been married to Michael. They are the other pair of divorcées in the group, and apparently, Rachael's first marriage, which lasted 10 years, was pretty much a bust.

"A year and a half," says Michael, referring to his first, five-year marriage. "Then two months with Rachael."

"I'd say zero," Clem says. Zero years out of 21, that is.

"Three," is Marie's assessment.

"In this marriage," Aaron says, "all seven."

"I would say all 23 in my first marriage," Leigh says, "and in this marriage—two." The tick-tock-tick of the wall clock is deafening.

"So we begin to hear the disparity," Coché murmurs.

"Twenty-seven for me," Mark says.

"I'd say about 15," Sue Ellen says, so softly I can barely hear her. Her hand was resting on top of her husband's a few minutes earlier, but at some point, she took it back.

"I think there are, like, two days that haven't been blissful," Bella says of her yearlong marriage to Joe.

"That was actually my answer," he says.

Bella and Joe notwithstanding, the mood is leaden. "People change, in my opinion," Coché begins solemnly, "when there is nothing left to do." The corollary to that for her is another one-liner from the existentialist canon: "Despair is a great motivator."

Existentialist despair is founded in the belief in the ultimate meaninglessness of existence (there is no God to grant purpose), but Coché uses "despair" more broadly and tangibly. For existentialists, the answer to this universal tragedy isn't for man to throw his hands in the air, but to take responsibility for making meaning (while not losing sight of the ultimate absurdity of the endeavor). Coché sees herself as a guide for that task. "The changes you're able to do easily you're not going to need our help for," she tells the group now. "We're here to work with what doesn't feel okay...and I think now we can go back and keep talking."

The question the couples were considering— how they'd like to increase their own sexual enjoyment—sounds trifling in the current context. Except that sex has the potential to be deeply meaningful. (Even a Hobbesian like Freud believed it: "[T]he union of mental and bodily satisfaction in the enjoyment of love is one of life's culminating peaks. Apart from a few queer fanatics, all the world knows this and conducts its life accordingly.")

"I feel like I'm enjoying things much more," Aaron announces.

"So much better than you thought you ever would that you can't imagine it could be better?" Coché asks.

"Absolutely, right, right," he says. "As I like to say with a little humor, I've gone from kindergarten to college to graduate school."

"That's huge," Coché compliments him.

"The first time we were in bed together," Leigh has told me outside of the group, "Aaron just froze. He just became stiff, and he didn't touch me. He lay like this." She put her arms straight down at her sides, elbows locked. "He was petrified, absolute fear. The next day he broke out in shingles." Leigh told him their relationship was over unless he got professional help for his extreme anxiety, and he did, first in individual and couples counseling with Slowinski, and then here.

"We were reminiscing last night about how he wouldn't even stay in the room [after sex]," Leigh says now, in the group. But the night before, she continues to Aaron, "you were so loving and verbal." It's as if she's willing him to look at her, to soak up the appreciation in her eyes. She is a person whose smile transforms her appearance; you notice her intelligent eyes and ready warmth, her stylishly cut and highlighted hair.

As for what she'd like sexually, Leigh doesn't mention her earlier request. She is trying to ask for something she has a chance of getting. While the couple first had intercourse at about the same time they married, Aaron, as one might guess, still had a ways to go on sexual relations, and on close relations in general. "With his anxiety, it was like there was this wall," she says in private. "He didn't listen to what I was saying, didn't hear me crying." And their physical relationship had plateaued: Aaron never touched Leigh sexually; the couple always used a vibrator. For whatever reason, nine years of this was Leigh's limit. So at the beginning of last year, Leigh told Aaron she'd divorce him if he didn't touch her.

Aaron took her seriously; never before had she raised the prospect of divorce. With Slowinski, he reapplied himself to a desensitization program to lessen his near phobic reaction to the female anatomy; he agreed to take antianxiety medication; and he did what his wife required: He started to touch her every now and again.

So a year later, Leigh is here to keep their gains from evaporating, and she asks Aaron to continue to "notice her." She wants to be admired, told she's pretty—basically, she wants to be seduced a little.

"Anybody else in here feel like your enjoyment would increase if you were more noticed or your partner were more verbal?" Coché asks.

Clem sticks up his hand. "I wrote down `Wish my partner would show interest in me, wish Marie had more interest in sex and touching.' It's been hard for me, after 20 years. At one point I probably lost 25 pounds and got in really good shape, and even that didn't make any difference."

Clem is wearing dock shoes with no socks, and I find myself wanting him to cover his bare ankles, to stop making himself naked. This year, Clem continues, "it's just, uh, it's, uh, I'm trying to give Marie her space." A watched pot never boils, so to speak.

"You can't push it," Coché agrees. "But you can do what Leigh did, which is require that your partner keep working on it... Marie?" she asks. Marie is the last person up before lunch—Bella and Joe are going to address the question after the break.

"Um, I don't feel in the same place that any of y'all are," Marie says. She grew up in a rural area, and she hasn't entirely scrubbed the country from her speech. "Right now, I don't have a sexual need, because while you all are almost at the technique level, I'm at the inside-dead level."

"So if I can't nurture and expand the parts that make up myself," Marie goes on, "it's like asking somebody if they're hungry while they're choking."

"Wow, you should write a novel," Slowinski gushes.

Marie smiles, and I think I see a hint of pride (that she can outtalk the purveyors of the talking cure?) in her expression. Marie's graying brown hair hangs to the middle of her back, and she wears it in a long side ponytail. Hair like that in a middle-aged woman could be either a girlish affectation or a sign of indifference about her appearance. With 44-year-old Marie, I'll come to believe it's both.

If she could "develop" herself, she adds, "I kinda think the sexual part would flow easily." A medical administrator, she's been languishing in the same job for years. Her frustrating situation dates back to soon after she and Clem married, when he told her he wanted to move to the beach town where his family had had a summerhouse. He'd dropped out of college, and he was sure he could find a job there as a mechanic (he now works maintaining electronic systems for the federal government). Marie loved school, meanwhile, and graduated at the top of her class in biology. Settling in a small community would constrict her opportunities, Marie knew, but she never really considered asking Clem to follow her.

Then there is her marriage. Marie grew up as the bookish only daughter in a household of men—two older brothers and a father who, according to her and Clem, can best be described as bullies: physically intimidating, crude, and derisive of the opposite sex. For years, she says, she believed that she didn't have the "right" to expect anything from a man other than what he chose to bestow—and she is only beginning to forthrightly make her preferences known to Clem. Not that what she describes as her "submission" appears very submissive. Nonetheless, holding on to a firm sense of herself within her marriage seems crucial to her, and when Coché says that maybe the best the group can do now is to acknowledge her "chronic ennui" (the label Marie herself gives it), she is moved to tears.

She is adamant about one thing, however: Her dissatisfaction and quest for meaning should not be written off as depression, even though she makes comments like, "When you talk about oral sex, it's inconsequential if you're not sure you want to wake up tomorrow."

Coché nods, lips pursed. She is well acquainted with Marie's depressions.

The morning ends in notable weariness, not only because of Marie's formless disaffection; it's the formlessness of the group, too. How can a group devoted to sex be productive for anyone, when one couple wants to master the fine points of fellatio; one has spent a decade struggling with profound sexual dysfunction; and in another she can't be bothered by sexual desire, while he has staked it at the center of his existence?

After lunch, the members return to their former seats. Everybody is pretty quiet. Coché likes to extol the "community" in which the group enfolds couples, but so far I haven't noticed much. People ask one another the occasional question, deliver short pep talks, but the interactions seem dully safe, their impact glancing. Could this be how community starts? Could the group really become the modern equivalent of the Puritan village that psychologist Michael Vincent Miller depicts when bemoaning the isolation of the modern couple in his 1995 book, Intimate Terrorism? "What would it be like," he asks, "if as in the Puritan villages of old, representatives from the larger community were to step in, calm the two down, stress the larger social importance of their well-being, and offer support and help by redirecting the couple's energies away from mutilating each other toward something more cooperative?"

In the group's post-lunch lassitude, there is an unstated challenge to Coché: So how are you gonna pull this one off, Judith? She responds by taking on, tactfully, those in the group who she believes are avoiding what is bedeviling them. "Now is the time to come into this room with what's going on sexually and let it rip," she says. "Talk about what you're uncomfortable with right on the level of your dealings, and watch it wake up."

There is a long pause—will it ever end?— until Joe blurts, "I feel inadequate, on a performance level." The new guy saves the therapeutic day, or so it seems. Perhaps everything isn't corsages and "Stairway to Heaven" for the husband who'd seconded his wife's assertion that their one-year marriage has been unmitigated bliss.

"You talkin' about frequency, you talkin' about what?" Slowinski asks with studied informality.

"Length of session, everything." Joe has the stocky, square body of the college athlete he used to be. He shifts in his chair. Bella is looking on quizzically. "It's a damn cycle. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy almost," he says. "It's like, oh, okay, that was off, what was wrong with you? Now you're not actually showing up the way you used to."

"What does `showing up' mean?" Coché asks blandly.

"Uh, bringing to the table what..."

"Being aroused?" Slowinski interrupts.

"Getting aroused?" Coché interjects.

"Having a good erection, coming too soon, not at all?" Slowinski tries again.

"One orgasm and that's it for me." The room erupts in laughter—his "problem" is that he can't have multiple orgasms?

Later, I'll ask Coché the same question about Bella and Joe that I first asked about Rachael and Michael. They seem like they're still in the honeymoon stage; are Bella and Joe just here for general marital education? Coché gives me much the same answer: "This is a therapy group. If couples don't have a reason to be here, they can find much better things to do on the weekends." Once the jokes sputter out, Joe explains that it's not merely his own orgasm quota that is not being met; sometimes Bella doesn't come at all. That provokes a discussion among Bella, Rachael, and Leigh about how alienating it can be when their husbands get fixated on bringing them to orgasm to prove their own manliness.

"I don't all the time," Bella says. "That's not my reason for being with him."

"And have you said that to Joe?"

"Yeah, he'll make himself so crazy, go off in the corner because he didn't perform on some scale he invented that has nothing to do with me," Bella replies.

"I felt like I didn't even need to be there," Leigh chimes in.

"How do you feel now?" Aaron asks his wife. A few minutes before, he acted the elder statesman with Joe, commiserating about what it's like to fasten oneself to strict performance standards. But Aaron described his anxiety in the past tense, and he wants Leigh to join his triumphal parade.

"I feel like I need to be there," she says, stepping in line—almost. "But not all the time. Not all the time do I need to be there." Aaron doesn't dare turn toward her.

"I just realized where I veered off," Joe says, a "duh" in his voice. "It used to be that sex was the opportunity to be with Bella, and somewhere along the line it became the opportunity to prove that it was as good or better than the last time." As the group will slowly learn, Joe's need to prove himself in bed may have risen inversely in proportion to his ability to prove himself outside of it. Throughout the meandering discussion, Marie has been so quiet that it's been possible to forget that she's here, sunk in her chair. At last she speaks up.

"[The pressure for me] isn't about orgasm," she says, low and level. "Mine was the pressure for Clem to have a vasectomy." "Pressure for Clem to have a vasectomy?" Slowinski repeats.

"I feel like I was backed into a corner, put into a corner," Marie says.

"Into a corner about what?" Coché asks.

"That I had to agree," Marie says.

"To?" Coché's having to pull it out of her.

"To the vasectomy," Marie replies.

"Want to talk to Clem about it? He's right here," Coché says.

"Well, actually, the three of us talked about it," Marie says. The bottom of the pot has been reached.

Fifteen years before, after the birth of their second child, Clem told Marie he wanted a vasectomy. She signed the required consent, but now she is saying she felt forced into it, that she told Clem she wanted more children, but he "disregarded" her.

"We'd just had our second daughter, and I was laid off, and I couldn't make ends meet," pleads Clem. "[The procedure] was 10 dollars, my insurance would pay for it, and at that point, our relationship wasn't going that good, and I didn't want to add another child into the mix." Marie didn't want to use birth control, he adds, and "I thought maybe we'd have more sex if we didn't have to worry about getting pregnant." The irony would be funny if it weren't so poignant. The lengths to which Clem went to get more sex may have actually gotten him less.

Coché addresses Marie: "How many times have you felt backed into a corner and had to give up part of yourself?"

"Pretty much since day one," Marie says, oddly cheerfully. The therapist is digging into her past to help explain how it was that she agreed to something that so devastated her, and then spent the next decade and a half uttering not a word of it to Clem.

"And how many times did it feel like it was men backing you in the corner?" Coché asks, knowing the answer.

"If it wasn't by men, it was for men," Marie says, referring to the contortions her mother put herself and Marie through to meet the demands of the men in the family.

"So will you turn to your husband and tell him, `My assumption is that when push comes to shove, and you want something, I don't count—you will simply do what you want, anyway'?" Coché says.

Marie assents.

Clem's face is pink; he is not used to being seen as the heavy. "I didn't know she felt that strongly about it," he says. The group is like a rapt courtroom. "I, uh, at the time, I think I was taking charge, and I was angry. I was taking charge," he repeats. The aggression of Clem's arguably unilateral decision to have a vasectomy is clear, but as Coché starts calling witnesses for the prosecution, you can't help but feel he's being tried in a kangaroo court. She asks the women how they'd feel if their husbands said, "I'm having a vasectomy—sign this."

"Very severe," Sue Ellen offers.

"Might it have felt abusive?" Coché prods.

"Yes," Sue Ellen says, tersely, per usual.

"Let me say something on Marie's behalf that she doesn't know how to say yet, because it would feel too harsh for her," Coché begins. "If I were Marie and wanted to talk to you about it, I might say something like"—and the therapist enunciates each word—" `How dare you rob me of that birthright.' "

"If you were me," Clem rebuts, "I had every right. That's how I feel about it."

No joke. Coché explains that she's channeling Marie's resentment. Marie's everyday treatment of Clem is laced with this hatefulness, the therapist says, so the couple might as well get it out on the table—examine it like a pathologist searching a vital organ for the source of the disease. Eventually, Coché gets around to asking Clem whether it would feel "appropriate" for him to ask for forgiveness from his wife.

"Because Marie will think I'm just saying it and not really meaning it."

"If you thought she'd take you seriously, would it occur to you to ask forgiveness?"

"Yes."

"Marie, are you okay with taking responsibility for your part in this?" Coché asks.

"Definitely," Marie says quickly. Even she may be feeling that Clem is getting dumped on. Marie blames herself, she says, for not being able to say, as Coché paraphrases it: "Look, Clem, I gotta talk this out. I'm giving you a no because I can't give you a yes." If she'd been that direct, Clem says, he would have put the surgery on hold.

"I believe you when you say that," Marie says. And then Clem says he's sorry, for his cruelty, for not listening to his wife more.

"Well, at least you're taking some part of it," Clem says. He still seems offended.

Leigh starts to praise Marie for breaking her silence on the 15-year-old breach—"It is so incredible"—but Marie suddenly interrupts her with a grin: "I'm sorry, but I have to go to the bathroom."

The group audibly exhales.

Earlier, Coché told the group that a reason couples like to be with other couples is that they "can sit back and breathe a sigh of relief: `I thought I was in the worst shape in the room, but that other person has it really bad.' " Or, I imagine: Aren't we a picture of marital harmony compared with them?

As the first day of the sex weekend ends, it is Clem and Marie's marriage that gives perverse comfort to the others. But before the year is out, another couple for whom I perhaps least expected it, will be weighing divorce. Another pair will be confronting the husband's attraction to men, while a third will make a stunning turn for the better. There will be miscarriages and infertility, job loss and betrayal. The prize for worst marriage in the room won't stay in any one couple's hands for long.